Brain in a Box

There is no ghost in the machine. It is turtles all the way down. Or as Julien Offray de La Mettrie put it Man a Machine:



The above needs to be tempered. Our positivist and reductionist scientific worldview makes claims that go too far for a pragmatist. From a section in Lecture 47 of Daniel N. Robinson's The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2^nd Edition:

[William] James the pluralist is not a relativist of the modern stripe. He countered the reigning positivism of his day with fallibilism. There is always more to the account than any current version can include, because there are always other experiences, other beliefs, and needs. We must conduct ourselves in such a way as to record what we take to be our highest interests, while never knowing if we have them right or have matched our interests by our actions. There is no final word.

William James was, above all, a realist: We must accept what is. Unlike the positivists, however, James took this to mean that we must accept that there is a religious element to life, because credible report points to the existence of one, as well as to a striving to perfect oneself and to needs that go beyond the individual soul or body. There are, however, things that we cannot finally know. The fallibilist doesn't deny that there is some absolute point of focus on which human interests can converge, but we are warned to be suspicious of those who come to us with final answers.

The most profound lesson of modernism is to recognize the limits of our reason, the limits to knowlege, and the ultimate fallibility or each of us. The existentialist is right in noting that we project ourselves into our future with a hope that has no foundation. In the end we all die, but we live as if we would live forever. We theorize as if there is "ultimate truth" when in fact we live in a very small corner of an inconceivably huge universe in which we don't even know how many physical dimensions exist or whether there are other "universes out there" beyond our ken.

In some deep sense we are a "brain in a box" but science has not plumbed the depths of what this means. Yes, we are "only" matter in motion. But that matter, the brain, is so infinitely more complex than a figure like de La Mettrie had not a hint of what it truly means. And just as de La Mettrie claimed more than he really knew, so today's scientists and philosophers make claims far beyond what will be ultimately revealed. The universe is far more complex and mysterious than the human mind will ever comprehend. But that doesn't mean that we don't enjoy the quest. Knowledge and truth are still the shining lights on high that we strive to attain.

David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years"

This is an excellent speculative historical review of how debt, money, slavery, coinage, and government arose. It is chock-a-block full of obscure but interesting facts. The analysis is fresh and thought-provoking. I'm not in a position to assess the scientific validity of his reconstruction of ancient societies, but it rings true to me.

If you want a new perspective on how economic forces shape us and our societies, this is a "must read" book.

Here is just a tidbit from his chapter on the Axial Age (800 BC to 600 AD):

This is the key to Seaford's argument about materialism and Greek philosophy. A coin was a piece of metal, but by giving it a particular shape, stamped with words and images, the civic community agreed to make it something more. But this power was not unlimited. Bronze coins could not be used forever; if one debased the coinage, inflation would eventually set in. It was as if there was a tension there, between the will of the community and the physical nature of the object itself. Greek thinkers were suddenly confronted with a profoundly new type of object, one of extraordinary importance -- as evidenced by the fact that so many men were willing to risk their lives to get their hands on it -- but whose nature was a profound enigma.

Consider this word, "materialism." What does it mean to adopt a "materialist" philosophy? What is "material," anyway? Normally, we speak of "materials" when we refer to objects that we wish to make into something else. A tree is a living thing. It only becomes "wood" when we begin to think about all the other things you could carve out of it. And of course you can carve a piece of wood into almost anything. The same is true of clay, or glass, or metal. They're solid and real and tangible, but also abstractions, because they have the potential to turn into almost anything else -- or, not precisely that; one can't turn a piece of wood into a lion or an owl, but one can turn it into an image of a lion or an owl -- it can take on almost any conceivable form. So already in any materialist philosophy, we are dealing with an opposition between form and content, substance and shape; a clash between the idea, sign, emblem, or model in the creator's mind, and the physical qualities of the materials on which it is to be stamped, built, or imposed, from which it will be brought into reality. With coins this rises to an even more abstract level because that emblem can no longer be conceived as the model in one person's head, but is rather the mark of a collective agreement. The images stamped on Greek coins (Miletus' lion, Athen's owl) were typically the emblems of the city's god, but they were also a kind of collective promise, by which citizens assured one another that not only would the coin be acceptable in payment of public debts, but in a larger sense, that everyone would accept them, for any debts, and thus, that they could be used to acquire anything anyone wanted.

The problem is that this collective power is not unlimited. It only really applies within the city. The farther you go outside, into places dominated by violence, slavery, and war -- the sort of place where even philosophers taking a cruise might end up on the auction block -- the more it turns into a mere lump of precious metal.

The war between Spirit and Flesh, then between the nobile Idea and ugly Reality, the rational intellect versus stubborn corporeal drives and desires that resist it, even the idea that peace and community are not things that emerge spontaneously but that need to be stamped onto our baser material natures like a divine insignia stamped into base metal -- all those ideas that came to haunt the religious and philosophical traditions of the Axial Age, and that have continued to surprise people like Boesoou ever since -- can already be seen as inscribed in the nature of this new form of money.

It would be foolish to argue that all Axial Age philosophy was simply a meditation on the nature of coinage, but I think Seaford is right to argue that this is a critical starting place: one of the reasons that the pre-Socratic philosophers began to frame their questions in the peculiar way they did, asking (for instance): What are Ideas? re they merely collective conventions? Do they exist, as Plato insisted, in some divine domain beyond material existence? Or do they exist in our minds? Or do our minds themselves ultimately partake of that divine immaterial domain? And if they do, what does this say about our relation to our bodies?

I heartily recommend that you read this book.

Defining the "Self"

I love to puzzle about questions like "what is the purpose of life?", "is a virus alive?", "how do you know when you 'know' something?", etc.

Here is the cartoonist Scott Adams (aka creator of the Dilbert cartoon) taking the puzzle of defining what makes you 'you' and giving an interesting reply:

Have you ever wondered who you are? You're not your body, because living cells come and go and are generally outside of your control. You're not your location, because that can change. You aren't your DNA because that simply defines the boundaries of your playing field. You aren't your upbringing because siblings routinely go in different directions no matter how similar their start. My best answer to my own question is this:

You are what you learn.

If all you know is how to be a gang member, that's what you'll be, at least until you learn something else. If you become a marine, you'll learn to control fear. If you go to law school, you'll see the world as a competition. If you study engineering, you'll start to see the world as a complicated machine that needs tweaking.

I'm fascinated by the way a person changes at a fundamental level as he or she merges with a particular field of knowledge. People who study economics come out the other side thinking a different way from people who study nursing. And learning becomes a fairly permanent part of a person even as the cells in the body come and go and the circumstances of life change.

You can easily nitpick my definition of self by arguing that you are actually many things, including your DNA, your body, your mind, you environment and more. By that view, you're more of a soup than a single ingredient. I'll grant you the validity of that view. But I'll argue that the most powerful point of view is that you are what you learn.

It's easy to feel trapped in your own life. Circumstances can sometimes feel as if they form a jail around you. But there's almost nothing you can't learn your way out of. If you don't like who you are, you have the option of learning until you become someone else. Life is like a jail with an unlocked, heavy door. You're free the minute you realize the door will open if you simply lean into it.

Suppose you don't like your social life. You can learn how to be the sort of person that attracts better friends. Don't like your body? You can learn how to eat right and exercise until you have a new one. You can even learn how to dress better and speak in more interesting ways.

I credit my late mother for my view of learning. She raised me to believe I could become whatever I bothered to learn. No single idea has served me better.

I would put down Scott Adams' "definition" as an 'aspirational' definition of self. Its purpose is to motivate you to learn and grow. In reality, you are something quite different from what you "learn". I had that driven home to me when my mother developed a brain tumour and the operation to remove it was botched by an incompetent (but licensed) surgeon. It left her with left neglect and other cognitive impairments (she couldn't visually distinguish me from my brother but she could tell by listening and by using deduction, e.g. the clothes we wore who was who). She was still "my mother" but a big chunk of her was gone.

What that hammered home is that we are a meat machine. You mess up the brain tissue and you change "you" into something else. The religious nuts can talk about soul and an afterlife and other fantasies, but the reality is that we have one life in this world in this body and if the body is broken we change and if the body dies we are gone. It is a real mystery that matter can be alive. It is an even bigger mystery that matter can be self conscious. Life is a wondrous thing. I find it really disgusting that religious "know it alls" pound on a book and claim they have all the answers. Why they have is a blighted mind and a refusal to experience the mystery of life, this wonderful, brief gift we have, and the chance to interact with others using the mystery of our minds. Our being alive is truly mind-boggling. To demean this by pretending that some religious doctrine "comprehends" the meaning of life and "surpasses" mere mortal knowledge is disgusting. Life is too precious and wonderful to be captured by the scribblings of some religious fanatics.

A Right Proper Philosophy for Today

Now here's a street corner guy who is a step up from the old-fashioned guy in a sandwich board sign saying "Repent! The End is Nigh!". This guy has managed to absorb and synthesis the complete "message of today". This is what the political right and the big corporations want you to not just believe but to feel down deep in your bones. This is the new religion:



I find it really helps to have this "message" delivered in a proper English accent. It gives it so much more respectability and authority. It makes you want to drop to your knees and swear "I repent! Forgive me for I have sinned against the corporations and the political right. Forgive me. Bring me home. Let me become a blind consumer who is properly politically ignorant."

Post script: I would like to see the Occupy Wall Street protestors to use more humour like the above to disarm the vicious right that wants to bring down protest as "Un-American". The political right in the US has the "talking point" that the Occupy Wall Street has no "coherent political agenda". If you want to see very succinct statements of the OWS agenda, look at these statements.

Here is what the Republican presidential candidates call an "Un-American mob who are threatening our democracy":



What I see is a peaceful demonstration which is the very heart of a vibrant democracy. These are citizens in the street making known their opinions. There is no violence. This is an on-going peaceful assembly seeking the redress of grievances, a non-political gathering petitioning the government and the political parties to work diligently to redress the imbalance in the social fabric by giving the bottom 99% social justice in the face of corporate greed and the buying and selling of politicians by the Wall Street elite.

A Philosophy of Life Given Today's Science & Knowledge

There is a wonderful exploration of what stance we should -- our worldview -- given what various sciences and and wisdom tells us. It is all nicely summarized in simple cartoons at the blog Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

The cartoon format is the perfect way to convert stark intellectual reality into "bite sized" musings appropriate for our poor finite brains. Don't let the blog name or the cartoon format put you off. It is well worth taking a few minutes to ponder the Big Questions. Click the above link and explore.

The Anti-Libertarian Case

Here is a nice bit from Robert Paul Wolff's Credo that captures the complete falsity of a libertarian world view:

All of us eat grain we have not grown, fruit we have not planted, meat we have not killed or dressed. We wear clothes made of wool we have not combed and carded, spun or woven. We live in houses we have not built, take medicines we neither discovered nor produced, read books we have not written, sing songs we did not compose. Each of us is completely dependent on the inherited knowledge, skill, labor, and memory of all who have gone before us, and all who share the earth with us now.

We have a choice. We can acknowledge our interdependence, embracing it as the true human condition; or we can deny it, deluding ourselves into thinking that we are related to one another only as parties to a bargain entered into in a marketplace. We can recognize that we need one another, and owe to one another duties of generosity and loyalty. Or we can pretend to need no one save through the intermediation of the cash nexus.

I choose to embrace our interdependence. I choose to acknowledge that the food I eat, the clothes on my back, and the house in which I live are all collective human products, and that when any one of us has no food or clothing or shelter, I am diminished by that lack.

Sadly it is the crazy right wing libertarian viewpoint that dominates half of America, the half that applauds when a governor recites his "accomplishments" in executing people or a doctor/senator admits that if doesn't get paid he will quietly watch a man die because the only obligations he feels if for the money he makes off you.

Wolff offers up an alternate vision:

There are two images alive in America, competing for our allegiance. The first is the image of the lone horseman who rides across an empty plain, pausing only fleetingly when he comes to a settlement, a man apparently having no need of others, self-sufficient [so long as someone makes the shells he needs for his rifle or the cloth he needs for his blanket], refusing to acknowledge that he owes anything at all to the human race of which he is, nonetheless, a part.
The other is the image of the community that comes together for a barn-raising, working as a group on a task that no one man can do by himself, eating a communal meal when the day is done, returning to their homes knowing that the next time one of their number needs help, they will all turn out to provide it.

These images are simple, iconic, even primitive, but the choice they present us with remains today, when no one rides the plains any more, and only the Amish have barn-raisings. Today, as I write, there are tens of millions of Americans who cannot put a decent meal on the table in the evening for their families, scores of millions threatened with the loss of their homes. And yet, there are hundreds of thousands lavishing unneeded wealth on themselves, heedless of the suffering of their fellow Americans, on whose productivity, inventiveness, and labor they depend for the food they eat, the clothing they wear, the homes they live in, and also for the luxuries they clutch to their breasts.

The foundation of my politics is the recognition of our collective interdependence. In the complex world that we have inherited from our forebears, it is often difficult to see just how to translate that fundamental interdependence into laws or public policies, but we must always begin from the acknowledgement that we are a community of men and women who must care for one another, work with one another, and treat the needs of each as the concern of all.

I'm completely blown away by the cruelty of those who deny social entanglement of empathy and instead claim only the cold hard "money economy" as their only social relationship. I would hate to be the child of such a cruel and calculating parent. What good is a baby? What money can you make off it? I'm surprised that libertarians even bother to raise families because it goes so strongly against this political/social philosophy. But humans are not known for their consistency. They can espouse high ideals and secretly stab you in the back. Conversely, they can claim allegiance to the most vicious authoritarian ideals and still help the weak and defenseless. Humans are a puzzle.

Michael J. Sandel's "Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?"

I found this to be an excellent book. It posed thought provoking questions and walked me through various ethical standpoints. Unlike studying the ethics textbooks of my youth, this book was much more focused on real questions and applied principles much more clearly.

In my wasted youth studying philosophy, the texts on "ethics" were in fact more meta-ethics. They argued endlessly over what ethics could be, what ethical language could or could not convey, etc. They didn't actually dabble in the real world of action where choice is essential. This book is the kind of ethics text I would have loved to have seen back in the 1960s.

As he ends his book he broadens out the view of ethics. Here is his besst summary:

Three categories of moral responsibility

1. Natural duties: universal; don't require consent


2. Voluntary obligations: particular; require consent


3. Obligations of solidarity: particular; don't require consent

He derives the above from three traditions of moral thinking:

1. Kant's integration of morality, freedom, and reason into an ethic of "practical reason" that requires universal laws that treat individuals a ends and not means. From Kant's moral reasoning we get our natural duties but it says nothing of voluntary associations and collectives to which we belong.


2. John Rawls' refined liberalism with a kind of virtual "social contract" that requires you to judge morality by using a "veil of ignorance" to decide if you could generalize a principle to one where you were subject to its consequences. From Rawl's moral reasoning we get our principles of voluntary obligations that require us to be sensitive to others and the needs for equality.


3. Aristotle's teleological morality that requires ethical acts to be ones that "fit the true nature" of someone and which emphasizes the community in which one resides. From Aristotle's moral reasoning you get obligations of solidarity from being embedded in a community and the aspiration to be virtuous and fit the proper role in that community.

The above doesn't do justice to the book. It is rich with ideas and examples. It makes you wrestle with the author. I'm sympathetic to Sandel's desire to ground ethics in collectives, but I'm not happy with Aristotle as the theoretical foundation. I also have problems with Kant's metaphysical thrust of putting things just beyond the empirical world while to not be an idealist or rationalist.

I'm inclined to Sam Harris' project of trying to develop ethics from science. Sandel is right to reject utilitarianism as too simplistic. But the problem with most ethical thinking is that it picks principles out of thin air. Ethics needs to be grounded. Harris has a project to develop a "science of morality". From Wikipedia:

The science of morality is the controversial idea that morality can be prescribed only with the help of, and possibly priority of, the philosophy of the scientific method. This conception challenges traditionally held views both of morality and of science. This demands a philosophy of science and epistemological (theory of knowledge-based) justification that can deal with the "is–ought problem" (i.e."there are facts about what is real, but how do they ever become facts about what ought to be?"). The science of morality is a sort of ethical naturalism (moral facts are facts about nature) that challenges divine command and natural law-based moral justifications for first principles in ethics.

The wonderful thing about Sandel's book is that it makes you think. He maneuvers the reader to his point of view which left me a bit unhappy. But I was greatly impressed by the array of material he brought together and how wonderfully he weaved his story.

Through the Language Glass Redux

I had previously posted on Guy Deutscher's book Through the Language Glass" which discusses how language can help shape reality. The book rejects the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but presents a broader slice of language science to show early roots of the concept and the latest thinking which reaffirms the early findings that language does shape our cognition.

Here is a video that shows research into this area:



I especially enjoy the bit at at 3:00 into the video where selecting colour "differences" are shown. Since I'm red-green colour blind and "see" differences from what other see and have difficulties on standard colour blindness tests, I enjoy this bit showing this tribe being able to spot differences that Westerners can't while struggling to spot differences which are trivial for Westerners to see. Colour is a strange mixture of physiology and language. It is physically real and socially real with language overlapping differently and physiology overlapping differently in this one world that we share.

At 7:40 into the video when the experimenter asks "do we all see the same colours?" which is quite silly. It is well known that colour blind people see something different because their retina contains aberrant colour pigments in the cone cells. As a colour blind person I have to see something different but I conform to the colour language of the larger linguistic community and simply have to throw up my hands when tested closely and find I fail to meet their standards. I see "all the colours" but a careful test shows I can't make the distinctions normal people make.

And for more discussion of language, here is a previous post on language and reality I included a bloggingheads.tv video of Yale philosophy professor Joshua Knobe and the Stanford psychology professor, Lera Boroditsky, discussing language and thought.

It is wonderful to see progress in this field. And it is fascinating to think how our "inner selves" are shaped by the outer world. This ties back to the wonderful private language argument by Ludwig Wittgenstein:

... all language is essentially public: that language is at its core a social phenomenon. This would have profound implications for other areas of philosophical study. For instance, if one cannot have a private language, it might not make any sense to talk of private sensations such as qualia; nor might it make sense to talk of a word as referring to a concept, where a concept is understood to be a private mental state.

Fascinating stuff to think about.

R. P. Wolff Puzzles over a Liberal Education

I keep an eye on Robert Paul Wolff's blog The Philosopher's Stone and stumbled upon his meditation on "What Good is a Liberal Education?". He poses three transitional justifications for a liberal education:

as the stigmata of the upper classes, as the royal road to upward mobility, and as the entree into the Great Conversation

He rejects these, but I still have a very soft spot for the last of the three.

Here's the key bit that captures my foolish infatuation with higher education:

The ideal of the Great Conversation is merely an elaborate formalization of Wood's charming conceit. Western Civilization is conceived as a perpetual debate about a number of timeless questions, conducted by the great minds of the Judeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman tradition, with its medieval Arabic variants, through the medium of a small, but continuously growing, library of great works of philosophy, tragedy, poetry, fiction, history, political theory - and, more recently, sociology, anthropology, economics, and anthropology. Homer and the nameless authors of the Old Testament, Sophocles and Euripides, Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides, Cicero, Caesar, Paul and the Evangelists, Ovid, Sappho, Philo, Tertullian, Aquinas, Maimonides, Averroes, Avicenna, Erasmus, Luther, Chaucer, Calvin, John of Salisbury, Jean Bodin, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bacon, Montaigne, Descartes, Spinoza, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Locke, Galileo, Newton, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Herder, Marx, Smith, Bentham, Mill - on and on they come, quibbling, quarreling, drawing distinctions, splitting hairs, proving the existence of God, refuting the proofs for the existence of God, reading one another, referring to one another - a grand faculty seminar, captured for all time in no more than several hundred immortal books.

A liberal education - so this story has it - is a ticket of admission to the Conversation. Most of us are mere auditors, much as I was when, as a boy of ten, I sat on the steps of the staircase leading from my parents' living room and listened to my parents, my uncles and aunts, and the neighbors debating politics, literature, and the bureaucratic insanities of the New York City School System in which they worked. An inspired few actually enter the Conversation, and make to it contributions that will be taken up into the immortal lists of Great Books. But for the rest of us, it is enough that we have been initiated into its rituals and shibboleths. Throughout our lives, that eternal debate will be the intellectual accompaniment of our quotidien lives.

I was lucky enough as a dewy-eyed youth to go to an "experimental" college of the 1960s that was ungraded and focused on a "liberal education" and not merely the churning out of technical experts for the factories and offices of the future. I was in nirvana. I blossomed.

But then I went to graduate school and discovered myself back in a "high school environment" of grades and classes and even roll call! I withered. My joy in learning disappeared along with the lack of access to excited and interesting scholars. I had been spoiled as a youth at a college where classes were seminars and not lectures, where professors enjoyed their topics and would linger after class to answer questions. In graduate school I was reintroduced to "education" as a factory for stamping out graded and standardized minds. Needless to say, I dropped out of grad school and went and got a job in "the real world". But my joy in learning continues, but not in an academic setting. I still hold my ideals, I just recognize that contemporary institutions mouth one set of values but lives by another.

It is interesting that R. P. Wolff rejects my rationale and joy.

Here is his view of the purpose of a liberal education:

The true rationale for liberal education, in my considered and passionate judgment, is our society's desperate need for a reservoir of negative thought -and for some protected place in which young men and women can explore what my sons, some years ago, would have called the dark side of the force.

Here is an example from baby training:

One day, something inexplicable, terrible, frustrating, painful happens. The baby makes its demanding noise, with the cookie in full view just outside its reach, and the parent, instead of immediately handing it over, as has happened every day for as long as the baby can remember, now picks up the cookie, holds it tantalizingly before the baby, and says in what can only be construed as a deliberately sadistic voice, "Can you say 'cookie'?" Well, all of us know the rest of this story, for all of us have lived through it. The acquisition of language, the mastery of one's bowels, the control of one's temper - all of the stages in development that make one an adult human being who is recognizably a member of a society - all have a negative side, a side associated with shame, rage, pain, frustration, resentment, a backside, as we learn to think of it, as well as a positive side associated with praise, self-esteem, public reward, power, satisfaction - a front, which, as our language very nicely suggests, is both an officially good side and also a pretense, a fake.

By and large, we do not forget the frustration, the pain, the rage. We repress it, drive it out of consciousness, deny it, put it behind us, as we like to say. But, like our own backsides, and the feces which issue from them, they remain, and exercise a secret, shameful attraction for us.

This brief reminder of our common heritage makes it clear that the repression of "unacceptable" wishes - as Freud so quaintly and aptly labeled them in his earlier writings - is an essential precondition for our development of the ability to interact effectively with the world, and with one another. Mastery of our own bodies, mastery of language, the psychic ability, and willingness, to defer gratification long enough to perform necessary work, the ability to control destructive, and self-destructive, rages or desires - civilization, society, culture, survival depend upon them. But necessary though they are, they are painful; throughout our lives, we carry, repressed, the delicious, illicit fantasies of total, immediate, uncompromised gratification, of instantaneous, magical fulfillment, of the permission to indulge the desires that have been stigmatized as negative.

Personally I think that is a perverse presentation of the facts. The negative (Freudian) aspects are overplayed. Freud wasn't a scientist. He was more a novelist telling "just so" stories that sound credible but really aren't.

My experience of higher education had nothing to do with repressing desires. If anything, it was a romp, a joy, a discovery of an arena of pleasure that was far away from the demands of the workaday world.

As for high culture, I totally disagree with Wolff.

In this project, the great works of art, literature, philosophy and music of our cultural tradition play an essential, and rather surprising, role. Regardless of their manifest content and apparent purpose, these works, which we customarily consider the appropriate content of a liberal education, play a continuingly subversive role. They keep alive, in powerful and covert ways, the fantasies of gratification, the promise of happiness, the anger at necessary repression, on which radical political action feeds.

They don't convey any sense of subversive enjoyment and prod me with an "anger at necessary repression". Nope. I enjoy some high art for the sheer aesthetics. Some I don't care for. Similarly, I enjoy some low art for the sheer joy it brings me while I don't care for other aspects of low art. I get my pleasure from my interaction. I'm not some cog in some grand mechanistic psycho-drama that Marcuse or Wolff want to squeeze me into.

Playing "by the rules" is not some psychological repression. It is simply the game (or work or social environment). If I want to play I am required to play by the rules. But I'm free to reject the game or create my own game. But most people realize that if they "don't play by the rules, they will play alone". That isn't repression. That is just a fact of life. It causes no more anguish than to realize that I can't kick a 500 pound rock and expect to send it over the goalpost. I'm not repressed or compelled by the rock. It is just a fact. If I accept the fact, my life goes more smoothly. If I reject the fact, I'm in for a world of pain. It is my choice.

I just don't buy his argument:

In all seriousness, I suggest to you that this is the real justification for keeping alive the great tradition of liberal arts and letters in our colleges and universities. Not as a patina for modern aristocrats, not as an instrument of upward mobility, not even as an introduction to the Great Conversation, but as a way of putting young men and women in touch with their repressed fantasies of gratification, in such a fashion as to awaken in them the hope, the dream, the unquenchable thirst for liberation from which social progress must come.

But I enjoyed reading it. I didn't feel the least repressed by the thoughts nor did they invoke an "unquenchable thirst for liberation". Nope. That is a fantasy. A fun thought. But it is much like thinking I can punt a 500 pound rock over a goal post. I can enjoy thinking it. But it doesn't make up the reality of the world in which I live.

I do agree with the closing story that Wolff provides, i.e. great art or ideas can reach across decades and centuries and seize a person by the scruff of the neck, and given him a shaking that can liberate him from a lifetime of unthinking subservience to received authority. But that is exactly the joy of ideas without all the fussy nonsense about Freud and Marcuse. It is a chance to knock up against a great mind and realize a new thought, a new perception, a new theory, or a new aesthetic.

Don't take my word for any of this. Go read Robert Paul Wolff for yourself!

Taking Libertarianism Down a Notch

Here is a bit from a wonderful article by Stephen Metcalf in Slate magazine on libertarianism and Robert Nozick:

"Libertarianism" places one—so believes the libertarian—not on the political spectrum but slightly above it, and this accounts for its appeal to both the tricorne fringe and owners of premium real estate. Liberty's current bedfellows include Paul Ryan (his staffers are assigned Atlas Shrugged), Glenn Beck (he flogged The Road to Serfdom onto the best-seller list), Slate's Jack Shafer, South Park, the founder of Whole Foods, this nudnik, P.J. O'Rourke, now David Mamet, and to the extent she cares for anything beyond her own naked self-interest—oh, wait, that is libertarianism—Sarah Palin.
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With libertarianism everywhere, it's hard to remember that as recently as the 1970s, it was nowhere to be found. Once the creed of smart set rogues, H.L. Mencken among them, libertarianism all but disappeared after the Second World War. What happened? The single most comprehensive, centrally planned, coordinated governmental action in history—that's what happened. In addition to defeating fascism, the Second World War acted as a magnificent sieve, through which almost no one, libertarians included, passed unchanged. (To pick one example: Lionel Robbins, the most prominent anti-Keynesian before the war, served as director of the economic division of the British War Cabinet; after the War, Robbins presided over the massive expansion of the British higher education system.) By the '50s, with Western Europe and America free, prosperous, happy, and heavily taxed, libertarianism had lost its roguish charm. It was the Weltanschauung of itinerant cranks: Ronald Reagan warming up the Moose Lodge; Ayn Rand mesmerizing her Saturday night sycophants; the Reader's Digest economist touting an Austrian pedigree.

Libertarians will blanch at lumping their revered Vons—Mises and Hayek—in with the nutters and the shills. But between them, Von Hayek and Von Mises never seem to have held a single academic appointment that didn't involve a corporate sponsor. Even the renowned law and economics movement at the University of Chicago was, in its inception, heavily subsidized by business interests. ("Radical movements in capitalist societies," as Milton Friedman patiently explained, "have typically been supported by a few wealthy individuals.") Within academia, the philosophy of free markets in extremis was rarely embraced freely—i.e., by someone not on the dole of a wealthy benefactor. It cannot be stressed enough: In the decades after the war, a kind of levee separated polite discourse from free-market economics. The attitude is well-captured by John Maynard Keynes, whose scribble in the margins of his copy of The Road to Serfdom reads: "An extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam."

And then came Robert Nozick.

You really should read the rest of the article since the author now launches into a critical evaluation of Nozick.

Nozick drank the Kool-Aid of libertarianism:

As a moral philosopher, Nozick was free to stretch liberty further than even an Austrian economist. That is, he was able to separate out a normative claim (that liberty is the fundamental value of values, and should be maximized) from an empirical claim (that the most efficient method for allocating goods and services is a market economy). Free to pursue liberty as a matter of pure principle, Nozick let nothing stand in his way. Should we tax the rich to feed the poor? Absolutely not, as "taxation of earnings is on par with forced labor."

... when Nozick published Anarchy, the levee broke, the polite Fabian consensus collapsed, and hence, in rapid succession: Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, followed by Milton Friedman in '75, the same year Thatcher became Leader of the Opposition, followed by the California and Massachusetts tax revolts, culminating in the election of Reagan, and … well, where it stops, nobody knows.

The author begins his attack on Nozick by asking:

Can it really be that eliminating the income tax shows maximum moral respect for others? I thought a fraction of a rich man's fortune is to the rich man only money but to a starving man is freedom. Am I a moral idiot?

...

When I think with my own brain and look with my own eyes, it's obvious to me that some combination of civil rights, democratic institutions, educational capital, social trust, consumer choice, and economic opportunity make me free. This is not what Nozick is arguing. Nozick is arguing that economic rights are the only rights, and that insofar as there are political rights, they are nothing more than a framework in support of private property and freedom of contract. When I study American history, I can see why America, thanks to a dense bundle of historical accidents, is a kind of Lockean paradise, uniquely suited to holding up liberty as its paramount value. This is not what Nozick is arguing. Nozick is arguing that liberty is the sole value, and to put forward any other value is to submit individuals to coercion.

Here is the dirty little secret behind the birth of Nozick's libertarianism:

But there was a historical reason for Nozick's belief: the magnificent sieve. Harvard's enrollment prior to World War II was 3,300; after the war, it was 5,300, 4,000 of whom were veterans. The GI Bill was on its way to investing more in education grants, business loans, and home loans than all previous New Deal programs combined. By 1954, with the Cold War in full swing, the U.S. government was spending 20 times what it had spent on research before the war. "Some universities," C. Wright Mills could write in the mid-'50s, "are financial branches of the military establishment." In the postwar decades, the American university grew in enrollment, budget and prestige, thanks to a substantial transfer of wealth from the private economy, under the rubric of "military Keynesianism." As a tentacle of the military-industrial octopus, academia finally lost its last remnant of colonial gentility.

At the same time the university boomed, marginal tax rates for high earners stood as high as 90 percent. This collapsed the so-called L-curve, the graphic depiction of wealth distribution in the United States. The L-curve lay at its flattest in 1970, just as Nozick was sitting down to write Anarchy. In 1970, there were nearly 500,000 employed academics, and their relative income stood at an all-time high. To the extent anyone could believe mental talent, human capital, and capital were indistinguishable, it was thanks to the greatest market distortion in the history of industrial capitalism; and because for 40 years, thanks to this distortion, talent had not been forced to compete with the old "captains of industry," with the financiers and the CEOs.

Buccaneering entrepreneurs, boom-and-bust markets, risk capital—these conveniently disappeared from Nozick's argument because they'd all but disappeared from capitalism. In a world in which J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt have been rendered obsolete, reduced to historical curios, to a funny old-style man, imprisoned in gilt frames, the professionals—the scientists, engineers, professors, lawyers and doctors—correspondingly rise in both power and esteem. And in a world in which the professions are gatekept by universities, which in turn select students based on their measured intelligence, the idea that talent is mental talent, and mental talent is, not only capital, but the only capital, becomes easier and easier for a humanities professor to put across. Hence the terminal irony of Anarchy: Its author's audible smugness in favor of libertarianism was underwritten by a most un-libertarian arrangement—i.e., the postwar social compact of high marginal taxation and massive transfers of private wealth in the name of the very "public good" Nozick decried as nonexistent.

And the screw takes one last turn: By allowing for the enormous rise in (relative) income and prestige of the upper white collar professions, Keynesianism created the very blind spot by which professionals turned against Keynesianism. Charging high fees as defended by their cartels, cartels defended in turn by universities, universities in turn made powerful by the military state, many upper-white-collar professionals convinced themselves their pre-eminence was not an accident of history or the product of negotiated protections from the marketplace but the result of their own unique mental talents fetching high prices in a free market for labor. Just this cocktail of vanity and delusion helped Nozick edge out Rawls in the marketplace of ideas, making Anarchy a surprise best-seller, it helped make Ronald Reagan president five years later. So it was the public good that killed off the public good.

The author goes on to point out that Nozick eventually repudiated his "libertarianism". But sadly, like Keynes pointed out the deadly hold that "well articulated" ideas, even wrong ideas, have on people:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

The current popularity of libertarianism is the partying of small minds marching to great ideas that have been shown to be wrong. While the smart people have quietly slipped away from the party, the hangers-on are turning the party into a drunken debauch and long overstaying their welcome.

The author offers the proper way to look at life, a dynamic balancing between liberty and social responsibility:

Another way to put it—and here lies the legacy of Keynes—is that a free society is an interplay between a more-or-less permanent framework of social commitments, and the oasis of economic liberty that lies within it. The nontrivial question is: What risks (to health, loss of employment, etc.) must be removed from the oasis and placed in the framework (in the form of universal health care, employment insurance, etc.) in order to keep liberty a substantive reality, and not a vacuous formality?

Sadly, modern "libertarians" a simple-minded people who drive one idea right to absurdity, to a complete contradiction:

When Hayek insists welfare is the road is to serfdom, when Nozick insists that progressive taxation is coercion, they take liberty hostage in order to prevent a reasoned discussion about public goods from ever taking place. "According to them, any intervention of the state in economic life," a prominent conservative economist once observed of the early neoliberals, "would be likely to lead, and even lead inevitably to a completely collectivist Society, Gestapo and gas chamber included." Thus we are hectored into silence, and by the very people who purport to leave us most alone.

And:

Large-scale, speculative risk, undertaken by already grossly overcompensated bankers, is now officially part of the framework, in the form of too-big-to-fail guarantees made, implicitly and explicitly, by the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, the "libertarian" right moves to take the risks of unemployment, disease, and, yes, accidents of birth, and devolve them entirely onto the responsibility of the individual. It is not just sad; it is repugnant.

Sadly "libertarianism passes for a political "philosophy" when in fact it is a simpleton's reduction of complexity to a dogmatic idiocy. Tragic.

Barry Schwartz & Kenneth Sharpe's "Practical Wisdom"

This is a book I'm ambivalent about. It is an entertaining enough read. It carries an important message. But I was left feeling like I had eaten "empty calories". Maybe it is me. I'm stubborn, headstrong, independent, and deeply committed to learning and ideas, so giving me a message that people's lives would be better if their work were not focused on money, status, or rewards makes me shrug my shoulders. Big deal. I've known that all my life.

The only charm for me in this book is the bit of ancient Greek philosophy. I studied philosophy and I remember that at a key moment in my life I felt kind of stupid falling back on Greek Stoicism as the "guide" to my life. I was surprised at that time, but as I look back 40+ years later, I realize I had instinctively fallen back on the one bit of philosophy that was indeed practical, the ethics of the ancients.

This book lays out Aristotle's idea of "happiness" and shows why this can only be truly achieved by "practical wisdom". Not by money, fame, glory, or power. It is written focused on modern America looking at how "rules" and "incentives", supposedly tools to allow managers and moral leaders of society to guide people to better lives is in fact undermining them. The book is very good at looking at explicit examples of teachers, lawyers, doctors, and even a janitor to show how modern America is being hollowed out. For this reason, the book deserves being read. It is in fact a message that most people need.

But for those who aren't swept up in the hoopla of greed, sex, power, and adulation, this book doesn't really carry any shocking revelation or even any really useful guidance. It is entertaining. And I hope the message is embraced by the 95% who need the message, but I sincerely doubt that this book will change more than a very modest number of minds.

Besides some "case studies", the following excerpt gives you an idea of the level of "advice" this book offers:

The work of Martin Seligman, a distinguished psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania ... launched a whole new discipline -- dubbed "positive" psychology -- in the 1990s, when he was president of the American Psychological Association. ... He kick-started positive psychology with his book Authentic Happiness.

The word authentic is there to distinguish what Seligman is talking about from what many of us sometimes casually take happiness to be -- feeling good. Feeling good -- experiencing positive emotion -- is certainly important. But just as important are engagement and meaning. Engagement is about throwing yourself into the activities of your life. And meaning is about connecting what you do to the livs of others -- knowing that what you do makes the lives of others better. Authentic happiness, says Seligman, is a combination of engagement, meaning, and positive emotion. ...

The twenty-four character strengths Seligman identified include things like curiosity, open-mindedness, perspective, kindness and generosity, loyalty, duty, fairness, leadership, self-control, caution, humility, bravery, perseverance, honesty, gratitude, optimism, and zest. He organized these strengths into virtues: courage, humanity and love, justice, temperance, transcendence, and wisdom and knowledge. Aristotle would have recognized many of these strengths as the kind of "excellences" or virtues he considered necessary for eudaimonia, a flourishing or happy life.

Like Aristotle, we consider wisdom to be the "master virtue." Without moral skill, many of the other character strengths and virtues that Seligman identifies as essential to happiness would not do the job. Without such know-how, these strengths would be more like unruly children, leading to well-meaning actions that leave disaster in their wake -- recklessness, not courage; indecisiveness, not patience; blind loyalty, not commitment; cruel confrontation, not helpful honesty. Practical wisdom is the maestro. It's what conducts the whole symphony.

Seligman suggests that "authentic happiness" may only be achievable indirectly, as a by-product of living an engaged and meaningful life. And the two spheres of life Seligman singles out as most likely to provide such positive emotion, engagement and meaning are the same two Ed Diener's research turned up: close social relations with others and participation in meaningful work.

And this bit is the fundamental critique which this book offers to modern managers and intellectuals who are pushing rules and incentives as the "fix" for what ails the modern world:

We need to see how the current reliance on strict rules and regulations and clever incentives to improve practices like medicine, education, and law risks undermining the very wisdom of practitioners that is needed to make these practices better. Well-meaning reformers are often engaged in a kind of unintended stealth war on wisdom.

We absolutely must understand that the corrosion of wisdom is not inevitable. It can be resisted. ...

And finally, again, relying on research in psychology, we need to appreciate that cultivating wisdom is not only good for society but is, as Aristotle thought, a key to our own happiness. Wisdom isn't just something we "ought" to have. It's something we want to have to flourish.

I fear that the 2% who read this book are the 2% who don't need the message of this book. It is the 98% who are seduced by money, power, status, and fame who won't read this book who would benefit from the message in this book. But sadly, that is the way of the world. The 2% who actively try to understand their world and build a better place will read this book looking for more helpful suggestions, but won't uncover any stunning new knowledge. But the 98% who need this book will never read it and even if they stumble on it, they will disdain it because it isn't a "how to" book with "5 quick steps" to achieve their goals of dominance, wealth, social position, and instant stardom. Sic transit gloria mundi.

It From Bit

Here is a video of a panel talking about digital physics, the description of the world as discrete instead of continuous. John Wheeler gave this the memorable phrase "it from bit".

From the World Science Festival, the following video has these participants:

• Edward Fredkin, proponent of digital philosophy (DP), one type of digital physics and pancomputationalism


• Seth Lloyd, professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology


• Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara, faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and is an adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo


• Jürgen Schmidhuber, a director of IDSIA (Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale), a non-profit oriented research institute for artificial intelligence, affiliated with both the Faculty of Informatics of the University of Lugano and the Department of Innovative Technologies of SUPSI, the University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland

Skip the first 11:40 of introductions to get at the start of the panel discussion...



At 40:30 Fredkin points out that our universe as a simulation means that "the universe", i.e. "the computer", is somewhere else and what we call reality is just a consequence of that machine running its computations.

At 45:00 Seth Lloyd counters Fredkin with the standard physicist view which is that the world itself if the computer.

At 1:24:00 Seth Lloyd explains why this new view of physics as computation is important. This bit of the discussion arises in the context of looking at Conway's game of Life and seeing how a medium that can support computation can give rise to complex entities. They make the point that all of life is like viruses in that they seize the underlying computational machinery (in this case molecules and chemistry) and use the rules to create emergent complexity, i.e. "life", at a higher level. As he points out, this is where physics as computation can explain complexity whereas traditional physics simply has no power to explain the complexity around us.

Philosophy

I studied philosophy for 9 years in college and I never encountered a better distillation of the essentials of philosophy that what the comedian George Carlin had to offer. From Wikiquote, ThinkExist, Said What?, etc.:

Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty. I see a glass that’s twice as big as it needs to be.

I liked his profundity:

One can never know for sure what a deserted area looks like.

I try to keep my personal philosophy simple, so I use Carlin as a guide in all the complex issues:

So I say live and let live. That's my motto. Live and let live. Anyone who can't go along with that, take him outside and shoot the motherfucker. It's a simple philosophy, but it's always worked in our family.

Whenever I get full of myself I think of this:

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

And I keep things in perspective by realizing my tendency to blame others:

You ever notice the first thing someone says when they can't find something is that it was stolen? They say "who stole it?!". It's an ego defense. They can't stand the fact that they might have been stupid enough to have lost something.

I enjoyed how he made fun of people who are fast at finding easy explanations for complex stuff:

Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.

Think about that. It has to be true because 100% of cases of swallowing saliva lead to death. And as far as I know, nobody has successfully avoided death by failing to swallow saliva. So that makes it an open-and-shut case, saliva kills! (At least if your "science" extends to correlations and can't be bothered to find causes.)

And I am convinced that the following has something to do with cause and effect, or maybe it is just a funny correlation:

Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn't mean the circus has left town.

I like his take on religion:

Don't give your money to the church. They should be giving their money to you.

And this:

Sun worship is fairly simple. There's no mystery, no miracles, no pageantry, no one asks for money, there are no songs to learn, and we don't have a special building where we all gather once a week to compare clothing. And the best thing about the sun, it never tells me I'm unworthy. Doesn't tell me I'm a bad person who needs to be saved. Hasn't said an unkind word. Treats me fine. So, I worship the sun. But, I don't pray to the sun. Know why? I wouldn't presume on our friendship. It's not polite.

Besides philosophy and religion, I liked his politics:

It's a great country, but it's a strange culture. ... This has got to be the only country in the world that could ever come up with a disease like bulimia; gotta be the only country in the world where some people have no food at all, and other people eat a nourishing meal and puke it up intentionally. This is a country where tobacco kills four hundred thousand people a year, so they ban artificial sweeteners! Because a rat died! You know what I mean? This is a place where gun store owners are given a list of stolen credit cards, but not a list of criminals and maniacs! And now, they're thinking about banning toy guns - and they're gonna keep the fucking real ones!

And this:

They [the Reagan Administration] want to put street criminals in jail to make life safer for the business criminals. They're against street crime, providing that street isn't Wall Street.

And this:

Let me get a sip of water here...you figure this stuff is safe to drink? [audience yells "No"] Actually, I don't care, I drink it anyway. You know why? 'Cause I'm an American and I expect a little cancer in my food and water. I'm a loyal American and I'm not happy unless I let government and industry poison me a little bit every day.

And this:

You know how I define the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there... just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep 'em showing up at those jobs.

Sadly George Carlin decided to take that call from God and now he's not with us. He should have simply refused the call and replied "There ain't nobody here but us chickens..."

A Question of Philosophy?

Here is a post by Dean Baker on his Beat the Press blog that reveals what the press knows about "philosophy":

The Wall Street Journal Tells Us It's All About Philosophy

The news media keeps trying to tell us not to worry about who gets the money, the issue is one of philosophy. The WSJ picks up the task today telling readers that the difference between conservative and liberal budget plans:

"The big takeaway is this: The debate over how to reduce the deficit is truly a philosophical one about the size of government."

Is that so? The Congressional Budget Office tells us that it will cost $34 trillion (5 times the size of the projected Social Security shortfall) more to provide Medicare equivalent policies through private insurers than through the traditional government Medicare program. This would be additional money paid by taxpayers and beneficiaries to insurers and providers. Is the desire to hand this money over to these groups a question of philosophy?

Go read the original post to get the embedded links.

I should point out that the role of the media in a democracy is also a question of philosophy, but obviously these Wall Street Journal types have never bothered to study the issue. They know as much about philosophy as the average dog knows about higher mathematics. Zilch!

The Philosophy of Government, Supposedly

Here is a nice post by Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog that ridicules the idea that the difference between the Republicans and Democrats is "just a difference in philosophy":

The Wall Street Journal Tells Us It's All About Philosophy

The news media keeps trying to tell us not to worry about who gets the money, the issue is one of philosophy. The WSJ picks up the task today telling readers that the difference between conservative and liberal budget plans:

"The big takeaway is this: The debate over how to reduce the deficit is truly a philosophical one about the size of government."

Is that so? The Congressional Budget Office tells us that it will cost $34 trillion (5 times the size of the projected Social Security shortfall) more to provide Medicare equivalent policies through private insurers than through the traditional government Medicare program. This would be additional money paid by taxpayers and beneficiaries to insurers and providers. Is the desire to hand this money over to these groups a question of philosophy?

Go read the original post to get the embedded links.

I suppose that whether you are a billionaire or a beggar is just "philosophical". One obviously interested in "higher things" (like bigger numbers) while the other can't get his mind out of the gutter (or the cardboard box in which he resides). Yes, it is all "just philosophy".

Political Commentary on American Politics by Bertrand Russell

I was reading the section in Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy on Protagoras, the Sophist. I found this paragraph interesting because it provides some social commentary about America written by a very smart guy with the perspective of 1945. It makes clear the changes in the political life of America over the last 65 years. I've bolded the key bits:

In many cities, however, and especially in Athens, the poorer citizens had towards the rich a double hostility, that of envy, and that of traditionalism. The rich were supposed -- often with justice -- to be impious and immoral, they were subverting ancient beliefs, and probably trying to destroy democracy. It thus happened that political democracy was associated with cultural conservatism, while those who were cultural innovators tended to be political reactionaries. Somewhat the same situation exists in modern America,where Tammany, as a mainly Catholic organization, is engaged in defending traditional theological and ethical dogmas against the assaults of enlightenment. But the enlightened are politically weaker in America than they were in Athens, because they have failed to make common cause with the plutocracy. There is, however, one important and highly intellectual class which is concerned with the defence of the plutocracy, namely the class of corporation lawyers. In some respects, their function is similar to those that were performed in Athens by the Sophists.

The world has changed. The plutocrats today are not cultural innovators. They have aligned with social conservatives. The technocratic and cultural elite, who are definitely not the plutocracy, are the ones advancing cultural innovation. Whereas in the 1940s the plutocrats of the Gilded Age had set up foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation which funded liberal causes, today the big money is funding right wing think tanks and socially reactionally organizations like the Tea Party.

Today Catholics and Evangelicals and fundamentalists of all stripes have formed a conservative political coaltion like Tammany Hall to push a reactionary agenda of kirche, küche kinder (specifically an anti-abortion, anti-feminist, anti-gay agenda).

Progressives, the "enlightened", are seen as impious and immoral and are thought to be limp wristed New York elite liberals. They continue the rainbow nation agenda of the 1960s with a hope for "peace and love" with inclusion for all segments of the population. They push an agenda of tolerance and understanding. They still stand for the ideals of The Age of Enlightenment with respect for science and a distrust of traditionalism and old hierarchies.

The real plutocrats in America are Wall Street, big corporations, and the top 1% of the population. Through the Republican party they use social consevatism to get the reins of power to run the government for the benefit of the plutocracy. The progressives, who are painted as New York liberals, in fact are not aligned with the plutocracy, so they are politically weak and have gotten much weaked over the last 40 years as Nixon used the "Southern strategy" to co-opt the conservative right as the base of the Republican party.

Learn Philosophy by Watching Science Fiction Movies

Modern communications and the ever more thoughtful thrust of popular themes in science fiction movies mean that you can learn all you ever wanted to know about philosophy from watching this derivative of Star Wars...



I find the superficial discrepancies between the French dialog and the English subtitles part of the charm of this exercise in philosophy.

This is a student's exercise in existentialism and post-modernism where you discover that desconstructing the "subtext" of the dialog exercises your ability to find philosophical depths beyond the merely suggestive readings provided by the literal subtext. Philosophy frees the mind to look behind these appearances to find layers of reality each with their own self reference and abundant existential possibilities.

The best discussion of post-post-modernism was captured by Alan Sokal in his brilliantly deceptive recreation of post-modernist techniques in his essay "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity".

I find that if you replace the pathetically derivative subtext of the above video by liberal reading from Sokal's article, you can quickly realize the profound essence of modern philosophy as it relates to the epistemic insecurity of the modern professoriate and the narrative strictures of academic philosophizing.

Forty years after the fact, I still look back lovingly to my experience reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Heideggar's Being and Time. The two great pillars of modern philosophy's plunge into irrelevance capped by the crowning glory of English philosophy, the jabbering of Ordinary Language Philosophy which was the death knell of empiricism and pragmatism in philosophy in favour of incoherence and nullity. OLP is a philosophical "stance" that let you step through existentialist text's dry discussion of angst and anomie and experience it directly, right off the page, as you wade through philosophical gibberish of the most learned sort.

Errol Morris Wrangles Philosophy

Having been a graduate student in philosophy many years ago and studied Thomas Kuhn, Saul Kripke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others mentioned in the following posts, I found this philosophical rant by film-maker Errol Morris fascinating. This brings back memories of my graduate student days, of the philosophy of science, of paradigm shifts, of possible worlds, of meaning, or reference, etc. In these postings Morris has exorcized his demons of graduate school.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Some of my favourite "moments" in the above essay:

I asked him, “If paradigms are really incommensurable, how is history of science possible? Wouldn’t we be merely interpreting the past in the light of the present? Wouldn’t the past be inaccessible to us? Wouldn’t it be ‘incommensurable?’ ”

...

I call Kuhn’s reply “The Ashtray Argument.” If someone says something you don’t like, you throw something at him. Preferably something large, heavy, and with sharp edges. Perhaps we were engaged in a debate on the nature of language, meaning and truth. But maybe we just wanted to kill each other.

The end result was that Kuhn threw me out of Princeton. He had the power to do it, and he did it. God only knows what I might have said in my second or third year. At the time, I felt that he had destroyed my life. Now, I feel that he saved me from a career that I was probably not suited for.

This reminds me of my student years. I constantly questioned my professors and found them wanting. Sure they were learned and smart, but most were brittle and dead to new ideas and were resistant to questioning. They preferred the students to sit at their feet and lap up the wisdom on offer.

Kripke’s theory provides an alternative to what had become known as the description theory, an amalgam of ideas proposed by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (And to that mix, in the ‘50s and ‘60s you can add Peter Strawson and John Searle.) Here’s one way to distinguish between Kripke’s theories and the description theory that preceded it.

You have two fish in a fishbowl. One of them is golden in color; the other one is not. The fish that is golden in color, you name “Goldie.” The other fish you name “Greenie.” Perhaps you use the description “the gold fish” and point to the one that is golden in color. You are referring to the gold fish, Goldie. Over the course of time, however, Goldie starts to change color. Six months later, Goldie is no longer golden. Goldie is now green. Greenie, the other fish — the fish in the bowl that was green in color — has turned golden. Goldie is no longer “the fish that is golden in color.” Greenie is. But Goldie is still Goldie even though Goldie has changed color. The description theory would have it that Goldie means the fish that is golden in color, but if that’s true then when we refer to Goldie, we are referring to the other fish. But clearly, Goldie hasn’t become a different fish; Goldie has merely changed his (or her) appearance.


It’s Kripke’s version of “Where’s Waldo.” If the description theory (courtesy of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein) is correct, then Goldie is on the right. If Kripke’s historical-chain of reference theory is correct, then Goldie remains Goldie no matter what color Goldie is.

You could also think of Goldie and Greenie in terms of beliefs, although this is not how the description theory was originally framed. Goldie is the fish that you believe is golden in color. But Goldie starts to change color. I can believe anything I want about Goldie. I can even believe that Goldie isn’t a fish, but Goldie — that fish out there swimming around in a fishbowl — remains Goldie.

These were the kind of logical "puzzles" I loved. This was why I graduate student pursuing logic in the philosophy faculty.

The most important and most controversial aspect of Kuhn’s theory involved his use of the terms “paradigm shift” and “incommensurability.” That the scientific terms of one paradigm are incommensurable with the scientific terms of the paradigm that replaces it. A revolution occurs. One paradigm is replaced with another. And the new paradigm is incommensurable with the old one. He made various attempts to define it — changing and modifying his definitions along the way.

When I read Kuhn's book the issue of "incommensurability" never came up. I took the simplistic view that a paradigm switch was a benign "larger view" that incorporated the previous science as a special limited case. So in Einstein's theory Newtonian equations hold as a limited case when speeds are near zero. Sure there were philosophical differences. Newton viewed space and time as absolute and Einstein showed they were dynamic and relativistic depending on your frame of reference.

In John Ford’s movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962), Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) becomes an archetypal hero for shooting and killing Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), the paid stooge of the cattle barons. But Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) – literally hidden in the shadows – is really the man who shoots him. Stoddard gets Doniphon’s girl and goes on to a spectacular political career – governor, senator, etc. Doniphon is the unsung hero. After many years, Stoddard, following Doniphon’s death tells a local newspaper editor what really happened, but the editor refuses to print it, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

A legend that is not true can never become fact, but it can get printed as fact, anyway. With Hippasus, it is pretty easy to imagine why the legend of his drowning got “printed” even before there was printing. Someone believed that there should have been a crisis even if there wasn’t any. They believed that the Pythagoreans should have been upset about the discovery of incommensurable magnitudes. But it was a retrospective belief, that is, a belief formed hundreds, if not thousands of years, after the crisis was supposed to have occurred. I find it mildly amusing – possibly even ironic – that Kuhn’s metaphor for “incommensurability” could have been derived from a Whiggish interpretation of an apocryphal story.

This is simply wonderful. I love the way Morris has brought his film-making into this discussion. And I love the way he nails Kuhn.

But there is a messier problem. Why stop at historical relativism? Why not imagine each and every person in a different island universe? And indeed, Kuhn at least in one instance seems to embrace that possibility. In one particularly bizarre passage in “The Road Since Structure,” he suggests that his critics are writing about two different Thomas Kuhns – Kuhn No. 1 and Kuhn No. 2.

...

To me Kuhn’s claim – that there are two Thomas Kuhns plus two books by the same name and author – suggests that there may be no coherent reading of Kuhn’s philosophy. Kuhn, of course, sees it differently. For Kuhn, the multiplicity of Kuhns and Kuhn-authored-books-with-the-same-title provides further proof of his belief that people with “incommensurable” viewpoints can’t talk to each other. That they live in different worlds.

This is the slippery slope of solipsistic theories of knowledge.

Years ago, Bertrand Russell wrote “Nightmares of Eminent Persons” (1954). (Supposedly, he was trying to meet alimony payments.) Among the various nightmares – the Mathematicians’s Nightmare, Stalin’s Nightmare, the Psychoanalyst’s Nightmare, Dr. Bowdler’s Nightmare – is the Existentialist’s Nightmare. At the conclusion of the nightmare, the existentialist is screaming, “I don’t exist. I don’t exist.” Poe’s raven appears, speaking in the voice of the French poet Mallarmé: “You do exist. You do exist. It’s your philosophy that doesn’t exist.”

I absolutely love this little tale of being hoisted on your own petard.

I often think of the attraction of smoking, that it simplifies the world into three parts. There’s you, there’s the cigarette, and everything else is the ashtray.

(This catches Errol Morris' latent hostility toward Thomas Kuhn who threw his ashtray at Morris.)

Please remember: This is not an empty intellectual exercise. It is not a matter of indifference whether it was God or natural selection that produced the complexity of life on earth. Nor whether there is such a thing as global warming. The devaluation of scientific truth cannot be laid on Kuhn’s doorstep, but he shares some responsibility for it.

One more parable. For those who truly believe that truth is subjective or relative (along with everything else), ask yourself the question – is ultimate guilt or innocence of a crime a matter of opinion? Is it relative? Is it subjective? A jury might decide you’re guilty of a crime that you haven’t committed. You’re innocent. (It’s possible. The legal system is rife with miscarriages of justice.) Nevertheless, we believe there is a fact of the matter. You either did it or you didn’t. Period.

If you were strapped into an electric chair, there would be nothing relative about it. Suppose you are innocent. Would you be satisfied with the claim there is no definitive answer to the question of whether you’re guilty or innocent? That there is no such thing as absolute truth or falsity? Or would you be screaming, “I didn’t do it. Look at the evidence. I didn’t do it.” Nor would you take much comfort in the claim, “It all depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?” Or “what paradigm are you in?”

(I like the way this makes clear that relativism is not an answer and Kuhn's incommensurability in of no use, and in fact a real danger as a glib answer. Morris still harbours a grudge against Kuhn and I have one for a "philosophy of education" professor I had who treated my claim that moral judgements could be objective as rank foolishness. But I didn't buy into ethical relativism and that outraged this professor. I am a realist who can subscribe to G. E. Moore's "ethical non-naturalism" or to Sam Harris' program to develop a science of morality. I waver, but one thing I'm sure of, moral judgements are of real facts not subjective whims or culturally defined tastes.)

It’s always been unclear to me, in social protest, is the important thing to be there, to be arrested, to be beaten, to be in the newspaper, to be booked, or to be incarcerated? Maybe all of the above.

Given the events in Wisconsin and other states, the above questions are as relevant today as they were in the 1960s protests against the Vietnam war.

The issue of murder, mass murder, has stayed with me over the years. It’s certainly part of the film that I made with Robert S. McNamara, “The Fog of War.” I remember sitting in the Firestone Library and reading volumes upon volumes of the transcripts of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. Ultimately I had the opportunity to go with Robert McNamara to the International Criminal Court [ICC] in the Hague, to show “The Fog of War” to the court, and to answer questions with McNamara.

And my two favorite moments from that experience – going with McNamara to visit the archivist for the ICC. McNamara told him, “I wish that they had these statutes governing war crimes back when I was secretary of defense,” and the archivist replied, “But, sir, they did.” Another completely bizarre experience, beyond Kafkaesque, seeing Milosevic on the stand. None of the proceedings had anything whatsoever to do with the content of the charges against him. It was all procedural — procedures about procedures about procedures, epicycle upon epicycle upon epicycle. And yet, the knowledge that Milosevic’s crimes were being addressed, even if only in a vague and uncertain way, was gratifying. At least someone was doing something.

I'm from the same generation as Errol Morris, so I'm very much caught up in the same issues as he is. Not just graduate school, not just philosophy, not just war & mass murder, but a stance toward life that was prevalent in many of the 60s generation.

Years later, I’ve come to realize that there was a debate embodied here about the nature of language – of whether truth is socially constructed or whether ultimately concerns the relationship between language and reality. I feel very strongly, even though the world is unutterably insane, there is this idea that we can reach outside of that insanity and find truth, some kind of certainty. ... There are endless obstacles and impediments to finding the truth – You might never find it; it’s an illusive goal. But there’s something to remember, there’s a world out there that we can apprehend, and it’s our job to go out there and apprehend it. It’s one of the deepest lessons that I’ve taken away from my experiences here.

This is more than philosophical. Morris makes it clear that this is a living issue with him, present in his films, and present in his engagement with the world.

The Cycle of Life

Here is the wisdom of the ages, the essence of 2500 years of philosopical and scientific inquiry, distilled into a diagram. Ponder this and learn the lessons of the sages:


See... it is all so clear. Now you understand. Your mind will never be troubled again by doubt, uncertainty, or confusion. And, the most surprising thing, the answer was so simple!

James Buchan's "The Authentic Adam Smith"

If you like chatty erudite biographies, this book is for you. There is no breathtaking insight into Adam Smith, but you do get a gritty feel for the man and his times in this concise little book. There is a lot of name dropping and the kind of intellectual history where you find who knew who and who talked to who and what ideas they exchanged.

To get a taste of the book's style, here is a bit from the introduction that nicely exhibits the pretentious ignorance of Alan Greenspan the infamous head of the US Federal Reserve system:

In his seventeen years as governor of the US central bank, Chairman Greenspan had become famous for impenetrable or Delphic sayings, but in Kirkcaldy he was clear. He said that Adam Smith was 'a towering contributor to the development of the modern world' for his 'demonstration of the inherent stability and growth of what we now term free-market capitalism'. This stability and growth arises, Greenspan said, in a principle discovered by Smith and called the 'invisible hand'.

'One could hardly imagine,' Greenspan said, 'that today's awesome array of international transactions would produce the relative economic stability that we experience daily if they were not led by some international version of Smith's invisible hand.'

Couldn't one?

The phrase 'invisible hand' occurs three times in the million-odd words of Adam Smith's that have come down to us, and on not one of those occasions does it have anything to do with free-market capitalism or awesome international transactions. One could with better justice claim that Moll Flanders, a resourceful whore in the fiction of Daniel Defoe who also uses the phrase 'invisible hand', is another towering contributor to the stability of international markets.

From that you get a sense of the meticulous pedantry of Buchan and his joy in using his deep knowledge of Adam Smith to put down those who claim a knowledge of Smith without doing the hard work. It is clear that Buchan has no love for the right wing ideologues who have taken possession of Smith as an icon of "free trade" and "laissez faire". As Buchan so skillfully shows, this is not the historic Smith nor is this what his famous writings justify. But this won't stop the ideologues from abusing poor Adam Smith.

Buchan's book fills a gap in understanding the complexities of Smith by discussing his first great book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This is the foundation which helps the reader understand his second great book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. But right wing ideologues remain blissfully ignorant of the first book because they want to "adapt" ideas from the second that fits their fancy whether it corresponds to Smith's actual beliefs or the text of the book. This book is a good antidote by giving you a short introduction to the breadth of Adam Smith's ideas.

Finally, here's another bit from Buchan's book which will give you a real insight into Adam Smith and his ideas:

'Political economy,' Smith writes, 'considered as a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator proposes two distinct objects: first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the publick services.' In the next sentence, he prescribes the panacea of every Scots financier and charlatan since John Law of Lauriston had won over the French Regency to paper money in 1715:'It proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign.'

How was it that the world had gained in prosperity? How was it as Voltaire had put it, that it cost little more to live in comfort under Louis XV in the eighteenth century than in discomfort under Henri IV in the sixteenth? 'The poor labourer,' Smith said in his lecture of 29 March 1763, 'bears on his shoulders the whole of mankind, and unable to sustain the load is buried by the weight of it and thrust down into the lowest part of the earth, from whence he supports all the rest. In what manner then shall we account for the great share he and the lowest of the people hav of the conveniencies of life.'

The answer is not the silver of Peru, nor the wisdom of the sovereign nor the discoveries of philosophers, but an instinctive form of industrial organisation: 'The division of labour amongst different hands can alone account for this.'

This is a delightful book. It won't teach you much economics, but it will entertain you and help you appreciate Adam Smith and the wonderful intellectual world of Edinburgh in the late 18th century.